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Neanderthals and early humans apparently were surrounded by small prey, but instead mostly ate woolly mammoths and other big game, according to two recent studies.

It's like a modern human who lives on a chicken farm but rarely eats poultry in favour of beef.

The findings, published in a recent issue of the Journal of Human Evolution, suggest that Neanderthals and our prehistoric relatives lived in organised communities that banded together early on to form hunting parties that took down large game.

The study concerning early humans focused on the 16,000-year-old 'Magdalenian woman' skeleton from a site called Saint-Germain-la-Rivière in France.

"This woman can be considered as an early ancestor of today's French population," says Dorothée Drucker, who led the study.

"From our calculations, meat of bison was predominantly consumed by this woman. Marine food, such as salmon, and small herbivores [such as] reindeer and saiga antelope were limited in her diet," she says.

Drucker's husband Hervé Bocherens led the Neanderthal research, which looked at 35,000-year-old Neanderthal remains from the Saint Césaire site, also in France.

The researchers concluded that woolly rhinoceros and woolly mammoth dominated the Neanderthal's diet.

Bone collagen contains isotopes, or atoms of different mass, from carbon and nitrogen that were in proteins people ate.

By measuring, dating and then comparing isotope values to those of plants and other animals, scientists can link the bone collagen proteins to their meat source.

The researchers had ample data for comparison, as the Magdalenian woman was found with the remains of saiga antelope, reindeer, bison, horses, red deer and wolves.

Antelope remains were plentiful and showed signs of butchering but, since the isotope analysis reveals the dominant source of protein, the researchers believe the woman favoured a nice bit of bison over an antelope steak.

The Neanderthal was found with the remains for aurochs (extinct cattle), bison, other bovines, giant deer, reindeer, horses, rhinoceros, mammoths and hyenas.

Clues from hyenas

Bocherens and his team studied the hyenas to determine what they were eating for comparison. They discovered that hyenas, which are known scavengers, consumed a lot of reindeer, large deer and horses.

Since the hyenas did not have much rhino or mammoth protein in their bones, that suggests the Neanderthals must have licked their meat bones fairly clean.

Paul Koch, who has worked on similar research and is a professor of earth sciences at the University of California, is not very surprised by the findings.

He says early humans probably butchered prey away from their base camps, which would explain the lack of big game bones at the sites.

The Neanderthal preference for large game could be why they coexisted with big animals for long periods, says Koch.

Such a specialisation might have contributed to the Neanderthal's downfall, though, as they would have been subjected to "boom-bust" meat cycles, driven by abundance or scarcity of big game associated with climate and vegetation changes.